Occluded
by Tramontana
Summary: Something sinister sneaks its way aboard the TARDIS. The Doctor and Martha must work to free themselves and perhaps to learn a little more about each other along the way. Another one on hiatus.
1. Chapter 1

"Ow!"

The exclamation of a certain Time Lord rang about the console room of his beloved ship and was followed by a solid Gallifreyan curse. He'd just gotten a shock off of one circuit or another, trying to tweak the TARDIS to perfection. He wondered if she wasn't taking his tinkering personally. Regardless, the only consolation she offered for his electrocuted fingers was a quiet beep somewhere above his head.

The Doctor unwound himself from the console's various innards and stood at the controls now, searching for the source of the sound. His eyes landed on a small light blinking rhythmically admist the other instrument displays.

"A psychic hail?" he mumbled. "I haven't had one of those in ages. . ." Intrigued, he reached for the toggle switch that would open the unusual frequency to the console room.

Martha was immersed in one corner of the wardrobe room when a violent shudder from the TARDIS sent her tumbling into a pile of stocking caps. The lights temporarily dimmed as the shuddering dissolved, leaving Martha less than comforted as she got to her feet and hurried out of the wardrobe.

"Oi!" she called as she barreled into the console room. "Working on our landing skills, are w-" she fell silent. The room was empty. "Doctor?"

"Turn it off..."

Her stomach flipped unpleasantly when she heard the Doctor's strained voice from the far side of the console. She spotted his trainers then and ran toward him. He was sprawled on the floor, eyes screwed shut, hands over his ears. She knelt down next to him, trying to discover what ailed him.

"Turn it off!" he said again, his tone desperate.

"Turn what off, Doctor?" she asked shakily. "I can't hear anything, what is it?"

He groaned as though in pain, and Martha frantically turned to the console. "What do I need to turn off, Doctor?" There were so many switches and buttons and levers. She was liable to materialize them into a volcano or something equally life ending.

"I don't know what it is you mean!" she said worriedly.

The Doctor rolled onto his side, one hand sliding up to clutch at his head. "Please . . . turn it off . . . "

"Doctor, what is it? What do I turn off?!" Her voice cracked. She was close to tears, knowing the solution was before her but unable to reach it. And then suddenly a little light blinked at her from the console, just above a brass toggle. Martha looked up the height of the rotors, realizing, or hoping at least, that it was the TARDIS showing her the answer.

She flipped the switch.

The TARDIS shuddered more roughly than before, requiring Martha to grip the edge of the console or be flung to the grate. The lights dimmed several notches and stayed there this time, and there was an eerie crackling noise somewhere up in the shadowed recesses of the ceiling. When the room had stabilized, Martha finally bent down to tend to the Doctor.

He had dropped his hands from his head and lay shaking next to the console, exhausted in the wake of whatever affliction had assaulted him. Martha felt her eyes sting again. "There was a signal," he said thickly, dragging his eyes over to meet her own. "A signal, but it was a trap. Like having your brain in a microwave..." He said something else but he was either speaking in another language or simply saying words she had never heard before. It was certainly odd to her ears.

"What? What does that mean?"

He blinked slowly. ". . . Your face is all blurry. . . blurry Martha..."

"Doctor, I don't understand what's happened. What can I do for you?" she asked him. She wasn't sure if he was looking at her anymore or just staring, unfocused.

"Not much." He spoke as though he had to concentrate to pronounce each word. Martha's face fell, feeling a weight from his response that she knew he did not intend.

"Well, not much is better than nothing," she told him quietly. "Tell me how to help you." There was no answer. "Doctor? Doctor!"

Whatever had affected him had quickly thrown him into a catatonic state. Or at least, that's what Martha would have called it had he been human. His eyes would not respond to light and she could not get him to stir or respond to anything even after a good thirty minutes. She'd managed to haul him onto a lounger and found a blanket to put over him. She didn't have enough experience with his cardio functions to know if his pulse, or pulses rather, were normal or not. Whatever drugs she might have chosen to treat what was wrong with him, even if she had them there, could be poison to a Time Lord for all she knew. Without knowing the cause of his stupor, she couldn't really safely medicate him anyway.

And then there was the TARDIS. Martha was pulling the Doctor's sneakers off to try and make him more comfortable when the lights dimmed almost to the point of leaving her blind in the dark. There was a drop in pitch in the ship's ever present hum, like the sound of some massive electrical device powering down. Then it stuttered back upwards again and the lights returned to their previously already-dim state. Martha felt her heartbeat pick up. She could hear that strange crackling noise again, filtering down from a place she could not see. How long until the lights went out completely? What if whatever it was that kept them warm and breathing went out, too?

For another ten minutes, she sat on the floor with her back against the edge of the lounger, massaging her temples and wondering what in the hell she was supposed to do. The Doctor hadn't so much as twitched since she'd moved him. Finally, she got to her feet and returned to the console, circling it and searching for some clue, some hint as to what was going on and how to fix it...

...Or where they were. It hadn't dawned on her to check that, and that, Martha could do. The Doctor had shown her how to operate the display screen at least. Of course, when she activated the viewer, it displayed in a language she had no idea how to read, and the TARDIS wasn't helping her, for whatever reason. Maybe the ship couldn't in it's current state...or maybe since it was a part of the console, the translation gift wouldn't work on it.

It didn't take much translation, however, to worry about the characters highlighted in red flashing large across the screen.

"Damn," Martha swore, and returned to the Doctor's side. She placed her hands on his arms. "Doctor, I really need your help. There's something wrong with the TARDIS. I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to fix _you_, you've got to tell me."

He only stared blankly through half-lidded brown eyes, just has he had been for nearly an hour now. Martha sank to the floor again, back against the lounger. She had half a notion to call her mother on her now-modified cell phone, out of reflex. But what would she say? Hey mom, my alien friend needs medical attention but his space ship sorta broke down. Can you send a tow?

Right.

Sighing frustatedly, her eyes rested on the far wall of the console room. She frowned when she realized what she was looking at. There were dark streaks running across the wall and through the roundels. A cold dread numbed her insides when she took a closer look. Dark tendrils of...something were weaving their way across the walls of the console room, branching out from somewhere above her head. They were thin jagged lines, criss-crossing with one another here and there, and they were spreading, like some sort of ivy. She didn't know what it was, but she knew it wasn't good. Especially since the lighting was starting to flicker around the areas where the "ivy" was highly concentrated. Staring at one such spot, she had a strange urge to touch it and slowly reached out her hand. Before her fingertips could brush the strange tendrils, several more suddenly burst forth from that particular spot and advanced along the wall, issuing the mystery crackling noise Martha had heard earlier.

"It's...it's taking over," Martha said tightly. "My God, it's taking over the TARDIS . . . "

But what was it? Was this what the Doctor meant? The signal that was a really a trap? Had tripping the signal somehow let something inside the TARDIS?

She backed away slowly from the thing creeping along the wall, and by all hope, before she could turn away from the sight of it, the Doctor gasped himself awake, jerking upright in the lounger. Martha jerked her head around, startled and relieved, and ran to him.

"Are you all right?" she asked him worriedly. "You scared the hell out of me!"

"What happened?" he asked, looking down at the blanket and his lack of shoes. "How long was I out?"

"About an hour," she told him. "I came in here and found you laid out on the floor. You said something about a signal. That it was a trap." He blinked, apparently remembering what was going on, and threw himself out of the chair. "There's something wrong the TARDIS," she went on, following him to the console.

"It tried to invade the ship through a psychic frequency, she's probably had an overload," he said tersely, flipping a switch here and pulling a lever there. He was frowning severely.

"Doctor, I think it succeeded," Martha said, her voice shaking again. "Look." She pointed to the spot she'd been staring at before, where the foreign lines were snaking all over the wall. The Doctor followed her gaze and visibly flinched when he saw it. He stepped down the console platform, still minus his shoes, and walked closer.

"No. No no no no _NO! _ Get _off_ my_ ship!!" _the Doctor yelled toward the ceiling, breathing hard. Martha stood frozen, feeling helpless and terrified. The Doctor turned and ran to the display monitor, dragging a hand through his hair and cramming his glasses onto his nose. He leant forward so that the glow from the monitor lit his face eerily. Martha watched as his dark eyes scanned the screen, moving rapidly over whatever he saw there.

"What can we do?" Martha spoke when she thought it was safe to. "How do we get this thing out of here?"

"I have to fetch some equipment," he answered finally. "From another room. And I'm gonna need you to stay here." Martha watched him retrieve his shoes and hastily pull them on.

"But I can help you-"

"You're staying here," the Doctor cut her off emphatically. "The ship is unstable, and fighting for control of herself. It could be dangerous. And besides, you will be helping me. I need you at the monitor to give me status reports, and direct me if need be."

"Direct you?"

"You know that the corridors change. There's no telling what it'll be like now." He was digging through a set of shelves, and amidst a cloud of dust, finally found what he was looking for. "A ha! Here." The Doctor tossed her a walkie talkie of sorts. "Hit the big button while you talk. Has it got power?" Martha fiddled with the thing until she finally had it switched on. "Yeah, it works. But Doctor, the screen-"

"I've switched it over to English." Sure enough, he had. The red highlighted characters now read "WARNING," very prominently across the top of the display. "Doctor, please be careful," she told him.

He turned to look at her before stepping out of the room, offering her a grin in the middle of all the disaster. "Don't worry. I'm always careful."

The door shut behind him and Martha turned back to the screen. "Yeah, that's a comfort," she said dryly, full aware of his history of being careful. She shifted her eyes to the tendrils again. "All right, you. You better behave, you hear me?"

All she could do now, was wait.


	2. Chapter 2

Well, I pretty much slammed the first chapter up without any sort of introduction, so just a few quick notes...

First, thanks to those who reviewed! I appreciate your kind words, and it really did urge me to continue.

Secondly, I don't own any sort of Doctor Who rights etcetera, etcetera...

Thirdly, there's a rating of K+ for the occasional language and possible scary happenings.

That's all for now!

ooOOoo

What he hadn't shared with Martha was that he was still feeling funny in the head. It was the same sensation as a person's ears ringing after being at an excessively volumed concert, but in this case, it was his head that seemed to be ringing. Unfortunately, his TARDIS wasn't going to stop falling apart just because he was feeling sub par, so the Doctor ignored it as he did many such things. He proceeded down what could have been considered a central artery of the ship, a corridor that connected to several others. The room he was searching for was one of half a dozen part laboratory, part storage rooms that existed within the ship's walls. There, he hoped to find the equipment he needed to draw out whatever had infiltrated the TARDIS and contain it.

The Doctor turned a corner and was greeted with the sight of the same black scrawling lines that were creeping along the walls of the console room. "No..." he murmured, staring at the faintly iridescent lines. He hadn't expected it to advance so far so quickly. He picked up his pace and spoke into his communicator.

"Martha, can you hear me?"

ooOOoo

She was so engrossed in keeping an eye on the monitor that she all but yelped when the Doctor's voice came over the two-way. "Loud and clear, Doctor," she answered. "Nearly gave me a heart attack there, you know."

"Yes, well, I'm sorry, but how's the situation there?"

"It's not getting any better," Martha responded. "These...vine...things, they're all over. It's stretched down along the wall almost to the floor now, on all sides of the room. The monitor's flickered a couple times too. To tell you the truth it's a bit creepy in here..." Actually it was a _lot_ creepy, but Martha didn't want to sound completely childish. "How is it on your end?"

"Pretty much the same," he told her, putting more distance between himself and a wall that had an especially dense knot of tendrils. "It's found its way out here, too. Not too many lighting problems yet, but if you're having them there, I'm sure there are a couple torches in one of the cupboards."

"Doctor, this thing...what is it?" her curiosity finally won out over her fear of the answer. Her eyes slid warily from the screen to the marred walls of the console room. The walkie was silent for a moment, and Martha wondered if she shouldn't have let fear be victorious after all. But he continued at last.

"It's a parasite of sorts that can survive in the Vortex. Feeds on several different kinds of energy; basically, whatever it can get. Sentient, but not in the way you and I are sentient. It operates largely on instinct, but it has something of a cognitive awareness. A drive to achieve its goals."

"So is that what it wants, the TARDIS' energy? What exactly _is_ this thing's goal?"

"To take over."

"Take over what?"

"Anything. Everything. It's a ship's parasite. Like barnacles on a sea vessel, only more detrimental and more intelligent. It wants to multiply and be everywhere, but it needs energy to keep growing. And it's using my ship as a smorgasbord." His voice had taken on a hard edge.

"Well, as long as there's nothing to worry about," Martha joked weakly, with a faint laugh. Couldn't they ever have one of those boring, simple days?

"I think the junction's been scrambled here, can you put the monitor in tracking mode? There should be a compass icon along the bottom of the screen somewhere," the Doctor requested.

"I see it," Martha confirmed, and activated the icon. The screen changed from a status display to a map diagram, centered around a small red dot. "Is that you?"

"Yes, there's a homing device in the each of the comm units. I'm facing what you'd call south, for all intents and purposes. Now, two of these corridors eventually go up a level, but one should go down. Can you tell which one? You might have to advance the screen forward a bit."

Martha poured over the display, tracing each corridor forward in turn. She had no idea how the map represented going upstairs or downstairs, but as long as the Doctor's memory served him, she really only needed to find the corridor that was different from the other two. Fortunately, the diagram proved relatively easy to navigate.

"All right, Doctor, if you're facing the triple junction, it's the one farthest left."

"Are you certain?"

"Yeah, the left one goes down, then splits into two."

"And do you a laboratory labeled on there anywhere? You might have to zoom in on a few rooms to see which one it is."

There was a brief interval of silence. "Yeah, I think I see it. Not too far after the triple junction."

"Good work." she could tell he was moving again. "Blimey, it's a lot darker along here."

"Has the power gone?" Martha asked him, glancing briefly at the walls again. The crackling sound was beginning to be a constant noise now. She watched the red dot progress along the corridor on the map.

"I'm not sure if it's the parasite or not . . . I haven't been down here in decades, to tell you the truth."

"Probably needs a good dusting," she quipped. She noticed the dot had stopped.

ooOOoo

The Doctor had indeed paused for a moment to dig the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket, simply for a source of light. He had gotten to a place where there was so little light that even his Gallifreyan eyes couldn't perceive it, and suddenly all the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. He switched on the screwdriver, and beheld the source of his unease.

The corridor he stood in now was _covered_ with tendrils. The walls and ceiling were almost completely black with them. Even now they were creeping along the floor toward where he stood, glistening like a puddle of motor oil. He turned to look behind him.

"You there?" Martha's voice brought him back to reality.

"I'm here," he said, stepping away from the advancing tide of tendrils very carefully.

"What is it?" she apparently read his voice. "Have you made it to the lab? What's wrong?"

"I may have to do things a little differently. I think it knows what I've got in mind."

"What? What are you going to do?"

"Yeah, still working on that. . . ." he could sense something heavy in the air, a tension, like a lion waiting to strike. The ivy-like organism was coalescing into one thick entity back down the hall from the direction he'd come, heading straight toward him. His backward steps turned into a trot as he watched it trying to catch up to him. "Martha . . . how near am I to the lab?"

"You should just about be on top of it by now, if I'm reading this right. To your...right, if you're facing the next fork."

The Doctor looked left, since he was turned about now, and all he saw was a writhing mass of black.

"I'm not sure the lab's too accessible anymore, actually. Does one of the next branches take me to a different level again?" He needed to get off this floor.

"Hang on, I'll look."

"The word of the day would be 'quickly,' Martha," the Doctor urged. The united rope of tendrils was weaving toward him still, along the floor. There was a wave of static over the comm, followed by choppy bits of Martha's voice. He shook the walkie and spoke into it once more. "You're cutting out, can you say that again? Make sure you're holding the button down."

"I _am_--------button down. I----left--goes down another level."

The Doctor angled the sonic screwdriver's blue light upwards. The ceiling was almost as black as the walls. He had a sinking feeling it was the source of their signal degradation. What's more, the mass of it on the floor was picking up speed. Very rapidly picking up speed. He wasn't sure what would happen if he was trapped in a certain part of the corridor or what would happen if he had to touch it. He didn't want to find out.

"Doctor, can---hear me?"

The Doctor turned and flat out ran. "Mostly," he called into the comm. "I need a way out of this part of the TARDIS, Martha. I'm going to head left when I get to the junction, but I can barely see three feet ahead of me, you're going to have to help me a long after that."

"-----breaking up, Doctor."

"Tell me where to go next!" he said very clearly. He could hear the tendrils close on his heels, like a a lot of animals trodding on a lot of twigs. The blasted thing was following him, trying to cut him off from finding anything that might stop it. At least with Martha directing him, a little bit of unforeseeable chance was thrown into the mix.

The Doctor met the fork at last and sprinted down the left branch. The blue flashes of light thrown out by the screwdriver as he ran were enough to at least tell him this hall was not quite so overcome by the parasite. Yet. Martha's transmission was suddenly clear over the communicator.

"Up ahead of you, there's some kind of symbol on the floor, maybe a hatch? Can you see it?"

"No...how close?" He had to get to it before the still-advancing tendrils passed him and covered it over.

"It's close. Really close! Stop!"

He promptly caught his foot on said hatch, still running at full tilt. He thought he heard something crack when he face-planted into the deck, but he couldn't be certain amidst the rest of the noise. The screwdriver and the comm skittered out of his grasp. The Doctor scrabbled for them as fast as he could and flung the hatch open. The black wave of tendrils was scarcely a meter away, and the crackling sound was almost deafening now as they traversed up the walls and onto the ceiling overhead.

The Doctor slid down into the access tunnel and slammed the hatch shut over his head half a moment before it was overtaken. His left shoulder throbbed unpleasantly. He let himself skid down a few rungs and watched the underside of the hatch darken to an oily black. Soon it began to finger out along what was now the ceiling above his head. The light that had still been working in this particular room until now was beginning to flicker. The Doctor put the walkie in his pocket and the screwdriver in his mouth and climbed carefully down the ladder. It was actually quite a drop, from the looks of it. He wasn't sure he knew what this room was even for. Maybe another store room? It was hard to tell in the dimming light.

When his trainers finally connected with the floor, he looked back up, still gripping a rung of the ladder above his head. Then he froze in mid-motion. He had just caught sight of the underside of his forearm where his sleeve pulled back.

After a very long moment, his left hand pulled the screwdriver out of his mouth and pointed its light directly at his right arm. Slowly, very slowly, he inspected his other arm as well. His hearts were pounding, and for a moment, he felt dizzy.

He finally registered Martha's voice shouting at him from the comm in his pocket.

"Doctor? Can you hear me? Doctor!"

"I'm here." He found his voice and answered the comm at last.

"Bloody hell! You scared me to death not answering for so long! Are you all right? Can you see more of that...that thing where you are now?"

"Martha."

"Yes?"

"I think we have a new problem."

The veins running along the underside of both his arms were pitch back clear up to the crook of his elbows.


	3. Chapter 3

Meant to update this sooner, but a lot of things got in the way, unfortunately. Thanks again for the kind reviews!

Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, etc etc...

oooOOOooo

There was a bout of silence from Martha's end of the comm now. The Doctor stared transfixed at the veins in his arms, tainted to an unnaturally dark color by the same force that was slowly overcoming the TARDIS, and waited for the inevitable question.

"I think I'm afraid to ask, but what's the latest good news, then?"

"The parasite, it . . . it hasn't only attacked the TARDIS."  
"What do you mean?" the faintest wave of static distorted the sound from the walkie as she replied.

"Well, apparently it's adapted to other life forms as well. Time Lords, in particular."

More silence.

"Are you sure?" her voice was anything but.

"I'm relatively certain that my blood vessels are not supposed to be black," the Doctor responded. He felt like he was listening to someone else take part in the conversation, rather than making it himself. He couldn't afford to have some annoying space barnacle mucking up his brain. Forcing him to harm people and destroy things. Leaving him powerless to stop himself.

'_Burn with me, Martha...'_

No. Not again.

"I'm coming to find you," Martha spoke suddenly over the comm.

"No!" the Doctor replied sharply. "You're safer there, and you can update me with information from the console."

"I want to help you!" she shot back, just as stubbornly.

"You _are_ helping me!" he countered.

Instead of another argument, her shrill cry echoed out from the walkie. All the scowl in the Doctor's expression faded, leaving alarm in its place.

"Martha? Martha! What's happened?"

After a few more gut-wrenching moments of silence, her voice returned to the airwaves, slightly breathless. "There were...sparks, from the console. I don't know how much long the power's going to last in here-" she yelped again. "Doctor, it's on all sides of the room now, and it's migrating toward the middle faster than I care to think about."

"All right, Martha, here's what I want you to do. I need you to search the map room directory for something called the Zero Room."

"Zero? Like the number?"

"Yes, that's right. When you've found it, upload the directions to the annex display and pop it off the console. It's portable. There should be plenty of prompts to get you there."

oooOOOooo

Martha was already paging through the touch screen interface as fast as her fingertips could take her. She could see the dark, oily mass of the parasite creeping along the surface of the grate in her peripheral vision. The circle of floor she stood upon now was rapidly shrinking. Thank God her schooling and work experience had forced her to become fairly computer savvy.

"Have you got it?" the Doctor inquired over the two-way.

"Nearly," she spoke, although her hands were two occupied to pick the walkie back up from where it now rested on the console. "Zero room, zero room...there! There it is!" Her fingers tapped another hasty rhythm against the screen, following the prompts to upload to the TARDIS equivalent of removable storage.

"Have you _got_ it?!" the Doctor transmitted more adamantly. She finally picked up the radio again.

"Yes! I've got it! What am I supposed to-" instead of finishing her question, she screamed and flung the walkie across the room. The close proximity of her face to the comm had given her a full, far too upclose view of the parasitic tendrils that were weaving their way around it. She looked at her hand frightfully, then to the console. Her own skin was clean, but the console certainly wasn't. Several more of the indicator lights had gone out or had changed to a sickly charcoal grey color, and the other lights in the room were dimming further yet. Fortunately, the display annex was safe and unblemished in her other hand.

She didn't want to run across it, with nothing but the souls of her shoes between her and some malevolent alien parasite doing its best impression of melted black licorice. Unfortunately, it was the only way to get to the door that lead out of the console room and deeper into the TARDIS. To the zero room. To the Doctor, whose voice called out frantically to her over the two-way that she couldn't retrieve.

_"Run_," Martha breathed, steeling herself. And then she did. She tore along the space between the console and the inner door, clutching the annex and reaching out to grasp her bag from the captains chair before she sped past it. She could hear the crackling all around her---could see the door slowly closing, creaking ominously on its hinges. She slipped through the narrowing gap sideways, loathe to touch any part of it, with barely a moment to spare before the parasite had webbed across the doorway and sealed it shut.

Worse still, her feet suddenly felt unnaturally cold. Bits of the ivy-like creature had attached itself to her shoes. In a near frenzy, she used her feet to fling them off and continued in a flat out run down the corridor.

"I'm coming, Doctor," she said for her own benefit, blood pounding in her ears as she ran.


End file.
